Barkada

A Filipino-American videogame

Mano po, Magic Sing, and halo halo

Final version

Unity project zip files, Production build for Mac

Barkada is a tribute to my experiences growing up as a Filipino-American kid, far away from any extended family. In many ways, this experience was one often characterized by feelings of frustration — not fitting in at family gatherings and not strongly identifying with the culture. But at the same time, it’s been one marked by unmistakeable pride and joy at all the little things that are just so Filipino. The foods, the customs, the traditions. Barkada takes you through a typical Filipino party through the eyes of a girl who’s coming to terms with this identity, and who ultimately wants to love it more.

Instructions

Barkada uses a mix of mouse and keyboard inputs depending on the presented minigame.

Reflections

Ultimately, I wanted to make Barkada because I had never seen Filipino people or Filipino culture represented in a videogame before. In reflecting on what it means to be artful or even sublime, I kept coming back to this idea of realizing a shared humanity or a common bond — something that makes me realize that there’s so much more to this experience than I can put into word. I’ve found that seeing things like my customs and people like my family represented in wider media is something that gives me, along with many other Filipino-Americans I know, glimpses at those feelings of sublimity. And given that my family friends and I would all huddle around with our DSes and play games like Pokemon together, I wanted to go for this 2D pixelated aesthetic.

Barkada was, by far, one of the most intense projects I’ve ever worked on throughout my time in college, and I’m really proud of the way a lot of things came together in the end. Looking back, I realize how many times I pivoted my idea or went back on some work I’d done for previous milestones, but in the end, I think it was worth the refactoring.

Acknowledgements

My parents, my sister, my friend Izzie who talked through a lot of these cultural experiences with me, Julia Mills, Make a Game Like Pokemon in Unity YouTube Series, Modern Interiors RPG tileset

Minimal essential system

For this milestone, I tried to focus on applying some of the notes and feedback I received from the last milestone. The two biggest things were (1) the narrative, and (2) defamiliarization. For the narrative, I wanted to implement a sort of third-person RPG style game, something inspired by games like Pokemon that I used to play when I was younger. I found a really helpful asset with 2D sprites and tilemaps and spent a majority of this week designing the house which the user will navigate in order to play each of the minigames. The vision is that the user can control the character to interact with different people / objects, which will trigger a scene switch into the minigame.

This was the first time I created anything in a 2D scene, so it took a lot of getting used to working with sprites and tiles. My biggest challenge came when I pressed play after finishing some final touches on the home scene and Unity crashed and created “Recovery GameObjects” for all of the tilemaps? Still not entirely sure what happened here since I had been saving throughout, but luckily, I was able to recreate a lot of it.

For defamiliarization, I tried to think about ways that I take advantage of Unity in order to afford new or wacky twists on these minigames.I want to take a bit of a humorous approach with the “mano po” minigame, randomly spawning tons and tons of new hands that you have to mano po — something that mirrors the idea of constantly meeting new titas, titos, lolas, and lolas that you didn’t even know you had at different parties.

For the third and final scene which I haven’t yet totally fleshed out yet, I want there to be a glass of halo halo sitting on a kitchen table. There’s a popular Filipino song playing as you walk closer to the glass, and when you stir it fast enough, the music glitches out, and you’re transported to a house in the Philippines with the same halo halo glass sitting on the table. An acoustic version of this song is playing, and you’re left to just explore this mirrored house in the Philippines.

Core mechanics

This is a rough draft of 2 of the 3 “minigames” or “microinteractions” I’m hoping to implement for this project. Admittedly, I’m not as far along as I hoped I’d be, as a lot of it looks super clunky and unfinished, but I hope this gives a vague idea of some of the ideas and gamification I’m aiming for. Ultimately, I want to play on this idea of gamifying different parts of Filipino-American customs since I’ve never really seen a videogame that centers the Filipino-American experience.

The first minigame simulates the “mano po” which is a common Filipino greeting — a sort of sign of respect between kids and their elders in which the younger person takes the older persons hand and holds it up to their forehead. This will take a lot more working through, as I want the user to be able to grab the other hands and actually click and drag them up toward the top of the screen.

The second minigame simulates karaoke, the most popular Filipino past time! The goal is for the user to be able to click and drag different lyrics to the screen and have the song play back to them, as if they were singing. At the end of karaoke sessions, there’s usually a score at the very end, so a reach idea would be to have the game “score” the user based on how well they were able to arrange the lyrics in the right order.

I haven’t gotten to the third minigame, but this will likely consist of the “time-traveling” idea in which the user mixes a glass of halo halo dessert and gets transported to the Philippines! Here, I want to play with filtering some music during the shift.

I am admittedly feeling a bit discouraged by the amount of work that's left to do for this project, just since I really want it to turn out at least vaguely like how I'm envisioning it. But trying to trust the process and think things will come together a lot more as the narrative becomes clearer.

Project proposals

Below are three initial ideas that I brainstormed for my final project. I think the idea of reflection through gradual composition is sort of a through-line beteen the three.

Barkada

This is an idea carried over from some of the concepts I’d brainstormed for the sequencer, as I’d inititally wanted to play with the idea of using the ingredients in a dish as the components that make up music. However, for this final project, I think I’d want to expand this viewpoint into a broader reflection on the many “ingredients” that make up one’s culture — in other words, the little things that define my Filipino-American experience, or that just make me feel the most Filipino-American. I envision an interactive game that takes place in something like a Filipino party with all of our titos, titas, and cousins. In the scene, there are a bunch of foods and activities typically associated with “Filipinoness” scattered all around the room / house. in the kitchen, there’s lechon, a rice cooker, halo halo, and Jollibee, and in the living room, there’s a karaoke machine, a bunch of shoes scattered at the door, a painting of the Last Supper, etc. Taking inspiration of MIDI.citi, the idea is that you can interact with these objects by clicking or dragging them together and that each action you take has an effect on the composition of music created by the overall scene. For example, mixing the halo halo affects tempo and turning up the karaoke machine affects gain. By the end, hopefully the user has created a symphony of Filipino sounds.

Fork

As this is my last quarter at Stanford, I think reflecting on my time here and all the mini decisions, factors, and influences that led me to where I am today have all been particularly top-of-mind. I’ve always been interested in the ways that small interactions or slight interests can blossom into these sorts of life-changing experiences and fundamental transformations, how “what if”s become reality. At the same time, however, choosing which of these interests to pursue and how is always exactly that, a choice, as it’s impossible to do everything all the time. For this idea, I’m interested in creating a project that centers on this idea of choice and how we decided to add or let go of things in our lives in order to chase new endeavors or hold on to old ones. Fork would be a game that’s constantly in motion, always moving forward in time and forcing the user to make life decisions that may have effects later on. This idea draws inspiration from Save the Date in that the user can choose between many different responses to these “forks in the road” that may lead to different outcomes, as well as from What Remains of Edith Finch — particularly the scene when there’s a boat traveling down a river and you have to make decisions where to steer it in real-time. I think I’d also want Fork to challenge this idea of a binary, having hidden ways to create new options and uncover other paths by melding different components of your life together in non-traditional ways.

KeyDR

This is probably the most “maximally distant” idea from the others, but it centers on keyboard interactions which I think is something that I’ve been wanting to explore and take advantage of in one of my projects. Unsurprisingly, KeyDR is a play on DDR (Dance Dance Revolution), the game where players step on four arrows of the ground to the beat of different songs. Instead of stepping on arrows, however, players would press different key combinations on their keyboard, perhaps going beyond the arrow keys or WASD and instead typing new words or patterns to the beat of the music. As of now, I’m not entirely sure how I’d incorporate a bit more reflection into this game, but I think a lot of its artfulness would come from the aesthetics and the audiovisual correspondence that allows players to enter that flow state.